Brain Drain Review

A waste of a name.

Brain Drain should have had a different name. Farm Swapper. Animal Spinner. Anything else. Because Brain Drain sounds kind of cool and fun, and this wimpy puzzler is anything but.

You're given a grid of animal-shaped icons in this one, and you've got to spin them around in groups of four at a time to make their positions match a pre-set goal that's displayed on the left side of the screen. So if the goal is to get four frogs on top and four ducks on the bottom, you'll move the cursor around and spin frogs and ducks until they line up that way. It's a bit like a Rubik's Cube -- you know the goal you're working for there, with each side displaying only one color. The game is just to spin the pre-set pieces the right way to get them to that end state.

It's a decent premise, but the presentation is a total mismatch -- the name, the animals, the music behind it all. Brain Drain feels like it was slapped together in about a week, and the diverse array of errors in grammar found in its Operations Guide lend further support to that theory. The gameplay stays too simple for too long, too -- some levels actually get less complicated as you move forward, instead of more difficult. You'll be able to solve several in, literally, less than five seconds. And the challenge-increasing tricks that do end up getting thrown at you, like pieces that turn invisible, are more annoying than they are challenging.

The Verdict

So skip right past Brain Drain here, and consider joining me in my new campaign -- ensuring that bad games don't have access to names that good designs might have wanted to use.